The most beautiful skins of the lynx come from Siberia, as belonging to the _Loup-cervier_, and from Canada, under the name of _chat-cervier_, because, like all other animals, they are smaller in the new than in the old world; and are therefore compared to the wolf in Europe, and to the cat in Canada. What seems to have deceived M. Klein, and might have deceived even more able writers is, first, that the ancients have said that India furnished lynxes to the god Bacchus; secondly, Pliny has placed the lynx in Ethiopia, and has said their hides and claws were prepared at Carpathos, now Scarpantho or Zerpantho, an island in the Mediterranean, between Rhodes and Candia; thirdly, Gesner has allotted a particular article to the lynx of Asia or Africa, in which there is the following extract of a letter from Baron Balicze. "You have not," says he to Gesner, "mentioned in your history of animals, the Indian or African lynx. As Pliny has mentioned it, the authority of that great man has induced me to send you a drawing of this animal, that you may include it in your list. This drawing was made at Constantinople. This animal is very different from the lynx of Germany, being much larger, has shorter and rougher hair, &c." Gesner, without making any reflections on this letter, contents himself with giving the substance of it, and intimating within a parenthesis, that the drawing never came to hand. To prevent a continuance of these errors, let it be observed, first, that poets and painters have affixed tigers, panthers, and lynxes, to the car of Bacchus, as best pleased their fancies; or rather because all fierce and spotted animals were consecrated to that god; secondly, that it is the word _lynx_ which constitutes the whole of the ambiguity, since by comparing what Pliny says in one[M] passage with two others[N] it is plain that the Ethiopian animal which he calls lynx, is by no means the same as the chaus, or lupus-cervarius, which comes from the northern countries; and that it was from this name being improperly applied that the Baron Balicze was deceived though he considers the Indian lynx as a different animal from the German luchs, or our lynx. This Indian or African lynx, which he has described as larger and more full of spots than our lynx, was in all probability, a kind of panther. However true or erroneous this last conjecture may be, it appears that the lynx, of which we are now treating, is a stranger in the southern countries, and is found only in the northern parts of the new and old continents. Olaus says this animal is common in the forests of the North of Europe; Olearius, in speaking of Muscovy, asserts the same thing; Rosinus Lentilius observes that the lynx is common in Courland and Lithuania, and that those of Cassubia, a province of Pomerania, are very small, and not so much spotted as those of Poland and Lithuania; and lastly, Paul Jovius confirms these testimonies by adding, that the finest skins of the lynx come from